SHEKHAR SHAH joined the World Bank in 1989 as Deputy Research Administrator after several years with the Ford Foundation and in the US financial sector. Shekhar has served as the Bank's Lead Economist and Country Coordinator for Bangladesh, Sector Manager for public sector management for Europe and Central Asia, Governance Adviser in the central Public Sector Group, and part of the team for the 2004 WDR, Making services work for poor people. Shekhar has worked on poverty, decentralization, macroeconomic stabilization and services delivery, in part promoting a clearer view of the role of politics and government failures in these areas. Shekhar was posted to New Delhi during 2004-08 as the regional field presence of the chief economist's office, and subsequently to Colombo. With Ariel Fiszbein, the Bank's chief economist for Human Development, Shekhar was the co-author in 2009 of Making Results Count, a strategy for monitoring and evaluation work on India. Shekhar received his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University and his BA in Economics from Delhi University.
Shekhar is the author with Shanta Devarajan of the flagship paper "Can South Asia end poverty in a generation?" that provides the inspiration and the title for the South Asia Blog. Click here to listen to a VOA interview with several economists on the prospects for reducing extreme poverty in Asia, among them with Shekhar talking about South Asia and answering the question posed by the flagship paper.